US media disputes Trump's claims in victory speech at New Hampshire

WASHINGTON: A section of the media in the US has disputed the claims made by former president Donald Trump in his victory speech at New Hampshire, where he defeated rival Nikki Haley by just 11 points, on the election numbers in 2020 and 2016.

Trump claimed that "they used Covid to cheat". At another point, he claimed that in addition to winning in 2016, "we also won in 2020 -- by more. And we did much better in 2020 than we did in 2016".

He dismissively said: "But as they said, we lost by a whisker."

CNN did a fact check and said Trump's claims were "utterly false".

Trump lost the 2020 election fair and square to incumbent President Joe Biden, by a 306 to 232 margin in the Electoral College, and also lost New Hampshire in that election.

There remains no evidence of any fraud even close to widespread enough to have changed the outcome in any state.

"Do they hate our country? They must hate our country. Because there's no other reason that they can be doing the things they do. Take a look – the taxes, they want to raise your taxes four times."

CNN did a fact check, and said: "This is false. Neither Biden nor other top Democrats are proposing anything close to quadrupling people's taxes."

The agency said it previously fact-checked a similar Trump claim that "they want to double, triple everything".

Howard Gleckman, senior fellow in the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute think tank, said in a email: "I don't know what 'they want to double, triple everything' means. But if he's suggesting that Biden would 'double, triple' federal income taxes, he's just making up numbers. There is no evidence to support that claim."

In contrast to Nikki Haley's Tuesday night speech in New Hampshire; she made claims that were either accurate or too general to fact check.

Trump complained about people formerly registered as Democrats being permitted to vote in the Republican primary, media noted that it was standard for states to allow people to switch affiliations by a certain date in order to participate in another party’s primary – and some states have switching deadlines closer to an election day than New Hampshire does.

In Trump's state of Florida, voters can switch from Democratic to Republican by February 20 and cast a ballot in the Republican primary in the early voting window that begins less than three weeks later or in person a month later on the March 19 election day. (Unlike in New Hampshire, independents can’t cast Republican primary ballots there.)

Trump's allegations on the recent New Hampshire affiliation-switchers are not nearly as clear as he suggested. While some might have indeed switched with the sole intention of opposing him, some others might have sincerely decided that they no longer saw themselves as Democrats.

There were all kinds of affiliation-switching before October 6. For example, the New Hampshire Bulletin reported that 719 people switched from Republican to undeclared and 132 people switched from undeclared to Republican.